Today I took a quick trip through the Eastwood neighborhood, near Liberty and Fortune Drive.  This was a residential neighborhood, and most of the houses were townhouses, with some small houses as I moved further from Fortune.  These seem to be relatively young, mostly early 2000’s homes.

With this area being dominated by multifamily homes and thus fairly dense, one thing that stood out was parking.  Parking appeared to be a big problem here.  No Parking signs were all over the place, in front of mailboxes, in front of trash cans, in front of private spaces.  And cars were everywhere, too, even in the middle of the day.  What do these people do when then want to invite company over?  The interesting thing is that there really didn’t appear to be a lack of spaces, with units having garages in most cases, and often a second dedicated space.  There were additional visitor spaces too.  So how many car spaces does a family living in a townhouse need?

I was reminded of something I saw recently about a residential parking garage in Portland that is well under capacity.  And while there are a lot of differences between downtown Portland and Lexington outside of New Circle Road, clearly there are conditions where people survive, get to work, get groceries, all presumably contentedly and with something less than 2 cars per family.  To an extent, we understand what those conditions are and they usually involve “density” and “transit” which are four-letter words in many places.  So part of the question for a city like Lexington may be whether it is desirable to create those conditions, and part of the question may be, if so, could they be created in a specific location such as this one.